~ PART 2 ~

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~ HA YUN – MISTY JASMINE INN ~

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“Teleport in three… two… one!”

Standing in the rain, Ha Yun watched the pot vanish in a swirl of mist.

“Stable!” Mo Shunfei called out after a moment.

“Well, that’s a relief. We won’t all die without knowing how we died,” Ding muttered, adjusting his hat.

“You knew we would be doing this,” Leng said, poking Ding in the back. “If you didn’t want to, you could have stayed at home.”

“We are up, anyway,” Xiang Meilan remarked, making shooing motions with the bow she was carrying.

Sighing, he walked forward, up the steps, followed by Xiang Meilan, Leng, Ding and the others to stand in a rough circle around the middle of the platform. The various hunters and Priestess Ying followed afterwards, then finally a rather vexed-looking Ha Caolun, Sir Teng and Sir Cao. Sir Huang was the last one on, waving to Mo Shunfei as they did so.

“No backing out now,” Chu Fang muttered.

“Ya think?” he replied, looking around.

“EVERYONE READY?!” Mo Shunfei called over.

“Yes…” he replied, adding his own voice to the rather lacklustre chorus of acknowledgements.

“Three… two… one—”

The gloomy pre-dawn light of the gorge vanished in a wavering swirl of mist, reforming around them to become a flooded plaza in the middle of a really quite substantial ruined town.

“Uh… this is not what I was expecting,” Ding muttered as they looked around, warily, at the shadowy buildings.

Following the others, he moved off the platform, looking around at the buildings and trying not to feel like every shadowed doorway held watching eyes.

“Yun, over here.” Sir Huang waved for him, and by extension the rest of their group, to make their way over to the side.

“How will this work now that we are down Wufan?” Jun Arai asked.

“Easier?” Lin Ling joked.

“Yeah, your group remains unchanged. Set off when you feel like it and report in regularly,” Kun Juni said.

“Okay,” Arai nodded.

He watched as Priestess Ying, Jun Arai, Jun Sana, Lin Ling, and Mu Shi started off down the steps, wading out into the knee-deep water of the plaza, heading to their right with barely a backward glance.

“Aii…” Ding sighed, and promptly got a comedic whack on the back of his head from Sir Huang.

“If you want to go with them you can,” Sir Huang remarked drily. “They are going up there…”

He pointed towards the towering massif behind them.

“…”

They stared up at the misty shadow and shuddered.

“Why there though?” he asked, recalling that they had been talking about scouting over the ridge, which was to their left…

“Spirit herbs, duh,” Caolun replied, still clearly not happy to be here.

-Did Sir Huang drag him out of bed or something? he wondered.

“So, how do we split this up?” Juni asked Han Shu and Duan Mu.

“We will take them”—Han Shu waved at Ding, Mun and the others—“and go back down towards the river, grabbing what we can, sweeping the far side and finish back at the lower teleport. If we do that early enough, we will come back here.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Duan Mu agreed.

“Teng, if you want to go with them?” Sir Huang added.

“Of course,” Sir Teng agreed.

“Well, good luck,” he said to Ding and Chu Fang, who were standing next to them.

“…”

Both nodded in thanks as they started to move off after Han Shu and the others.

Looking around, he found that left him, Xiang Meilan, Kun Juni, Ha Caolun, Sir Cao, Sir Huang and Leng – Shi Yufan having gone with Duan Mu and Han Shu.

“Right,” Juni said. “We are going to sweep the town. A very cursory check yesterday got a number of mushrooms and odd ferns. We also killed an Immortal realm cave centipede—”

“Uh….” Leng and Caolun both looked uneasy, even before he could point out that that was quite concerning. Cave centipedes were like alkyr, but with more legs and a worse temper.

“—That means that this place is effectively clean of anything bigger than your fist,” Juni added, cutting them off.

“Can you be sure of that?” Caolun asked, rather sourly. “An Immortal realm qi beast is not what you think…”

“…”

“And that is why Caolun is with us,” Leng muttered.

While he was also somewhat dubious about the lack of threat, he had to agree with Leng. As far as he knew, Caolun was barely even a Herb Hunter. If he had status at all, it was in some Guest Hunter role, where he could take missions and earn contributions points under advisement of a clan envoy and that was about it. That that kind of arrangement let Caolun have access to higher rank missions than he did was rather galling, in all honesty.

“Weapons out,” Sir Huang reminded them.

Nodding, he drew the blade he had at his waist and fell into line behind Sir Huang, on the grounds that that was the safest place round really.

“Is the whole ruin flooded like this?” he asked as they started wading across the plaza.

-Because if it is, this morning is going to be really miserable… he added in his head.

“Yes,” Juni said pausing to consider a street between tumbled-down buildings that ran parallel to the massif, towards a rocky area largely overgrown with vines.

“…”

They walked on in relative silence, because it was hard to talk and keep your footing in the knee-deep water, eventually heading down a street and into a smaller square.

“Yun, Leng, Caolun, stay here and keep a look out while we check the buildings at the edge,” Sir Huang said.

They watched in silence as Sir Huang, Kun Juni and Xiang Meilan spread out and headed into the various doorways, looking around warily.

“This is not what I expected,” Caolun grumbled after they had waited, largely in silence, for some five minutes. “Looking around at the dark buildings with their gloomy, overgrown doorways, wreathed in misty rain.”

“And what did you expect?” Leng muttered, perching on a rock so he was not standing in the water.

“I dunno… more spirit herbs?” Caolun sighed, slashing at some of the vines by a doorway and peering inside.

They bled milky sap, a few suckers falling into the water.

“It’s all spirit vegetation…” Caolun grumbled, looking around. “There are low valleys more bothersome than this…”

“We have only been here ten minutes,” Leng pointed out. “And frankly, if it stays this boring, I think we have lucked out.”

“I agree,” he said. “If all we can complain about after a day of this is that our feet are shrivelled and our trousers chafe, that’s probably a win for a day out in Yin Eclipse’s Inner Valleys.”

“I suppose,” Caolun sighed, pulling out a talisman and looking at it for a long moment, before shoving it back in his robe.

“I mean, it’s not like we will get to keep anything we capture,” he reminded Caolun.

“Not around the hunters, anyway,” Caolun agreed, looking into another building.

“You want to poke around on your own…” Leng scowled. “Are you mad? I mean, look at this place. It’s a veritable rat warren!”

“That seems to have nothing but vines and moss…” Caolun pointed out.

“And an Immortal realm centipede qi beast,” he reminded Caolun.

“Did you actually see it, though?” Caolun said.

“Well…”

Now that he thought about it, they had not put out the centipede, just the alkyr and other stuff.

“They showed the alkyr though,” he replied.

“Yeah, but those were only a realm or so above us, and we have lots of talismans…” Caolun replied.

“—no problems so far?”

They turned to find Xiang Meilan coming back over.

“Nope…” he shook his head, taking in the moss and vine drenched walls.

“Just spirit vegetation,” Caolun replied with pointed sigh.

“In that case, once the scan is done we can move on…”

“…”

“You have been scanning this, right?” Xiang Meilan said drily.

“…”

Pinching the bridge of his nose, because of course they had forgotten something, he took out a tablet they had been provided and put it on a handy block of fallen masonry.

Xiang Meilan eyed it and sighed.

“Well done, Yun,” Caolun muttered. “We are here for another ten minutes.”

“…”

“It’s another few minutes we are not being stabbed, poisoned, drowned or bitten to death,” he pointed out, poking the tablet and stepping back as it started to do its thing.

“Well, at least I thought to ask now,” Xiang Meilan muttered.

“…”

Leng just grimaced and continued looking around, choosing to say nothing.

In the end, the tablet took a rather uneventful ten minutes to complete its scan of their surroundings. By that point Juni and Sir Huang had also returned.

“I take it there is nothing in this area?” Kun Juni asked, looking around the courtyard.

“Nothing obvious,” Leng replied.

“Ah well, let’s move on down the street,” Kun Juni said with a sigh.

Heading back out into the street, Juni took the point, wading through the water, looking this way and that.

Caolun just walked along in silence, looking slightly annoyed. It again gave him an opportunity to reflect that his association with Ha Cao Caolun was a rather odd one. There were times when Caolun could be good company, yet equally, there were times, especially when he wanted to be superior and play the ‘Cao family’ card, that he could be utterly insufferable.

“How did you end up coming up here, Fairy Xiang?” Leng asked from beside him.

-Ah, he is something of a fan of hers… he recalled, wondering how Leng would have reacted if he had come to the baths…

-I should probably not tell him what he missed, he mused drily.

“I started off as a flower seller,” Meilan said. “The Pavilion offered free education… and doesn’t have the same prejudices as others, or didn’t back then. Eventually I met senior sister and she invited me to join the Cherry Wine Pagoda.”

“Oh…” Leng nodded. “So you were a Herb Hunter before you joined the Ha clan?”

“I am not a member of the Ha clan,” she replied drily. “I am a member of the Cherry Wine Pagoda.”

“But that’s a Ha influence,” Caolun muttered.

“Mmm… I suppose it is somewhat semantic,” Meilan conceded.

They ended up looking through three flooded courtyards off that street, before they finally found a spirit herb, albeit not quite in the circumstances he had been expecting.

They were investigating a semi-circular courtyard lined with vegetation-wreathed columns, when Caolun, who had gone towards the centre, to look inside the tumbled ruin of the building in the middle which held a gnarled tree growing up out of it, abruptly vanished with a splash and a curse.

“Ah shit!” Leng, who had been a bit further around, cursed and started towards the middle, drawing his blade.

Caolun surfaced a moment later, spitting mud and cursing as he struggled back to solid ground. “Motherless inauspicious whoreson set to plague…”

“What happened?!” he called over, hurrying towards Caolun.

“What does it look like—?”

A spider appeared, right beside Caolun, in the water.

“Aiiiiie!”

Caolun actually screamed and lashed out at the critter with his blade, splitting it in two and sending a smear of ichor through the water around him, which made him promptly gag and start cursing again.

“It’s already dead…” Leng said, poking another cat-sized spider that had drifted up, dislodged by Caolun it seemed.

“…”

“You going to help me out?” Caolun grumbled, still struggling in the muddy, leaf-saturated water.

Shaking his head, he withdrew a staff from his storage ring and held it out for Caolun, who gripped it and pulled himself back out of the water and sat down on a rock.

“Uh… you might want to take a purification pill, Caolun,” Leng muttered, arriving beside them.

“A purification…” Caolun trailed off, staring at the reddish blotches appearing on his skin where the spider ichor had touched him.

“Fate-thrashed-heavenly-virgin’s-blood…”

Caolun fumbled in his own storage ring; however, his hands were now shaking and his qi was clearly erratic.

“Here,” Leng, who had already taken a purification pill out, put it in a small pot of water and passed it to Caolun.

“T-t-thanks…” Caolun muttered, taking it and gulping it down.

“What happened?” Xiang Meilan had also appeared at this point, looking around warily.

“Caolun fell in here,” he supplied.

“I-I…I…”

Caolun tried to speak but only managed a few stuttered syllables, so simply nodded.

“…” Xiang Meilan poked another small, floating, spider corpse with her blade, then carefully picked it up by a leg. “Nasty little thing… did you get bitten?”

“N-n-no…” Caolun stuttered.

“Check him,” Xiang Meilan said to Leng. “Carefully.”

“He cut one, in the water. It appeared beside him when he fell in,” he supplied, because the ichor was barely visible in the water now, due to Caolun splashing about.

“Ah… that would do it,” Xiang Meilan said with distaste, dropping the spider corpse on a rock.

Looking around, he saw several more small spider corpses surfacing, courtesy of Caolun presumably stirring everything up.

“Caolun doesn’t seem to be bitten,” Leng, who had finished a cursory check of the slightly pale Caolun, declared. “Just the ichor in the water…”

“How many fingers am I holding up? Caolun?” Meilan asked, holding up a hand with three fingers showing.

Caolun grabbed for them a bit aimlessly.

“…”

“I guess he swallowed some,” Meilan sighed. “Did you give him a purification pill?”

“I did,” Leng grimaced.

“Give him another, a stronger one…” Meilan declared, then frowned and took a jar out of her own belt. “Actually, here, use this…”

Leng took the jar, decanted a pill and mixed it quickly with water.

“This spider ichor is that bad?” he asked.

“Yeah. It’s a ‘false shadow spitter’ by the looks of it,” Xiang Meilan answered. “Their bites are nasty, make you hallucinate something horrid. Their ichor also holds a mild paralytic that disrupts your natural qi cycle. Compounds refined from it are popular with people who like to spike drinks. These are all juveniles, so their ichor is especially concentrated.”

“Ah…” he looked around uneasily. “Does that mean there is a bigger spider around?”

Leng nodded, looking around uneasily at the vine-drenched pillars and the many, many hiding spots in the hazy rain.

“Maybe?” Xiang Meilan mused. “They carry their young with them for a while, in a web pouch under their abdomen. For these to be here, the queen likely perished in the flood as well…

“They like to be underground, in basements and the like… in places with high qi density…”

Xiang Meilan looked at the tree, then around at the circular enclosure and finally at the silty water, frowning. He watched as she warily waked over, poking the ground ahead of her until her foot sank.

“Wait here,” she said. “If I don’t come back in like… thirty seconds, go get Sir Huang and Kun Juni…”

“Uh…” he was about to ask where they were, but she had already stored away most of her clothes and slipped into the water with barely a ripple, sinking out of sight.

“Is… that okay?” Leng muttered uneasily, watching the ripples dispersing in the raindrop-pocked water.

He shrugged helplessly, looking around for Sir Huang.

Thankfully, barely half the allotted time had passed before Meilan resurfaced and hauled herself out.

“Well, I bring ‘good’ news,” Meilan declared, picking a few leaves out of her hair. “Caolun here put his foot through a weakened piece of stonework and has basically collapsed an opening into the chamber below this tree.”

“Oh…” Caolun, who had started to recover, grimaced.

“The spider queen, who based on its size looks to be a Quasi-Immortal, was living there, and there is a rather nice lingzhi maturing in the tree-roots. Likely that’s why the spider made its den there.”

“It was a Quasi-Immortal?” Leng asked.

“Yep,” Meilan confirmed.

“A… Quasi-Immortal spider… drowned?” Caolun, asked, disbelievingly.

“That’s what bothers you?” he muttered, though Caolun either didn’t hear it or pretended not to.

“It basically died in cultivation retreat,” Meilan clarified. “It looks like it forced its brood to something approaching maturity in a last ditch attempt to escape, but the flood got it anyway. Would certainly explain why the runtlings here are venomous enough to do that to Caolun.”

“So, what do we do now?” he asked.

“Now?” Meilan grinned. “Now you get to harvest spirit herbs, and a lot of spider cores!”

“…”

“Shouldn’t we wait for Sir Huang and Kun Juni?” Leng asked.

“Do you really need a clan elite watching over you while you fish dead spiders out of water?” Meilan asked, a bit archly he thought.

“…”

“No, I suppose not,” Leng conceded, looking around again with a grimace.

“First shift will be you and Yun, then,” Meilan added to Leng, who stood up with a sigh and started to strip down. “I’ll stay here and make sure Caolun is not adversely affected.”

Hardly able to refuse, he stood up and stored away his light robe, stripping down to the light trousers and sleeveless tunic he had underneath. Re-sheathing his blade, he waded over to the edge and warily grabbed one of the floating spiders by a limb. Even dead, they looked horribly unpleasant. It was something about the legs, and the way the eyes still held a disturbing glint in the hazy, post dawn light. It made him feel, perhaps not unreasonably, that they might be playing dead.

“Why is it always spiders?” Leng, who was also not a fan of them, as he recalled, grumbled, cautiously pulling another one close with a staff and scooting it into the shallows.

“What do we do with them?” he asked Meilan, who had put down a tablet and was starting to scan the surroundings for the map the hunters were making, he presumed.

“Just… pile them up on that slab over there I think,” Meilan pointed to a broad, mossy slab that had tumbled out of the interior wall of the circular building.

Nodding, he waded over and deposited the horrid thing in the middle, Leng following suit with a lot more nervous discomfort.

They spent the next few minutes clearing spiders, until the water was clear enough that they felt confident to actually go down. Once both of them had tied ropes, for safety, he sat down on the edge of the hole and took a few deep breaths, mostly to psyche himself up.

“Well, here goes nothing…” Leng muttered, and then slid under the water.

“…”

Taking a final breath, he followed suit.

The actual water was… cold, although he knew that that was only in comparison to the temperatures above. The underwater world was murky, the water full of silt as he carefully sank down until his feet touched fallen masonry. Looking up, the surface was barely visible, even to his qi-enhanced vision, simply a pale, greyish shimmer above them.

Leng, barely visible, tapped him on the arm and they both started carefully drifting forward, half walking, half swimming—

A long leg drifted out of the darkness, making him flinch, until he realised it was just another dead spider, a bit bigger than the ones on the surface.

“Queen?” Leng signed hopefully.

“…”

Carefully brushing it aside, he moved forward another metre… and found the lingzhi, though also, rather unfortunately, the Queen, which was about the same size as him, with long, spindly limbs and an oval abdomen. A drifting web sack hung, like a curtain in the water below it, scattering tens of smaller spiders.

Leng, arriving beside him, just mimed a grimace and a ‘nope’ sign.

“Let’s get… more-some… spider, out?” he managed, suddenly regretting he had not practiced the sign language a bit more.

“Yes,” Leng signed back, though fairly glumly.

Drifting over to one, he put his hand against it and watched unhappily as it failed to store.

-Don’t tell me it’s still alive in some way? he thought with a shiver, looking around at the murky mass grave of spiders.

Leng mimed a ‘sigh’ and grabbed the leg of a nearby spider and started swimming back, carefully.

They had worked at the rather laborious process for a full ten minutes before Kun Juni arrived to help. Once she produced a net, a large cloth and a bunch of grass baskets, things started to go much faster; they were able to use to rapidly store the smaller spiders while she took the large ones back one at a time. That was a task he was quite happy to let her own, as the large ones were supremely creepy as they drifted in the water.

The last one to come out was the queen itself, which Sir Huang came to help with. It took all four of them and a lot of nervous paranoia, to drag the horrible monstrosity back up to the surface, Caolun and Meilan helping from above.

Surfacing with a gasp, he pulled himself up and watched as Sir Huang and Meilan carefully dragged the queen away from the hole.

“Why won’t they store?” he asked.

“In your storage ring?” Sir Huang frowned. “Suppression messes with that. You need a storage ring refined up here, with comprehensions of spatial and soul Laws, before any corpse with an intact qi foundation that was born up here will store.”

“So… we have to butcher these?” Leng grimaced.

“No, actually,” Juni shook her head, withdrawing an arrow.

He watched as she eyed the spider queen’s eyes critically, then counted back a few hand spans on its head before placing the point of the arrow against a join in the chitin and giving it a short, sharp, shove. The arrow sank in almost to the fletching, a few drips of ichor welling up around it.

“Try now,” she instructed him.

Standing up, he walked over to the queen and tried to store it again… and to his shock, found that it worked, the body vanishing into the storage ring his father had given him.

“What did you do?” Leng asked.

“She broke the connection between its core and its meridian system. The spider was not really still alive, but at that point, the core could be revived if you were enough of a villain,” Sir Huang mused.

“…”

“I’ll deal with these,” Juni said, glancing at the others spider bodies. “Do you want to un-store that again so we are keeping all the spiders in one place?”

Focusing on the spider queen, he took the body back out. Juni put her hand to it and it wavered and vanished into the grey-ish blue band on her middle finger.

“Right, let’s get that lingzhi out,” Sir Huang declared, heading back to the water.

“I’ll speak to Lianmei, see if we can teleport it straight back,” Juni said.

“That would be good,” Sir Huang agreed, waving to him and Leng to come with him.

Slipping back into the water, they returned to the lingzhi, which was almost the size of his torso and a greyish-brown in colour. Unlike the other, this one did not have any real inner glow to it.

“How do we get it out?” he sighed.

“Cut the root it is on away,” Sir Huang sent back.

Eyeing the roots, which were thicker than his legs, he bit back a grimace.

“Leng, you mark branches,” Sir Huang said, a wood saw appearing in his hand. “Yun, take the other end of this.”

Relieved he was not expected to have his own saw… which he did not anyway, he took the end of the saw and moved with Sir Huang to the first root.

In the end it took them nearly twenty minutes to extract the lingzhi, including two breaks for him and Leng to go to the surface to catch their breath. By the time they had dragged it out, Juni and Meilan had set up a teleport formation, so they were able to send back the spiders and the lingzhi almost immediately.

“Fates… I feel knackered,” Leng groaned, sitting down on a block to nibble a vine-wrapped roll of spirit food.

“It does take something out of you,” Juni agreed.

Rather unfairly, he felt, she barely looked out of breath.

“What about the tree itself?” Caolun asked.

Sir Huang considered it and then just shook his head.

“Is it not also something valuable though?” he asked, curious on that point, given the lingzhi had been growing in its roots.

“Oh, certainly,” Sir Huang nodded. “However it’s still just spirit vegetation.”

“But that just means we could take it?” Caolun muttered.

“Waste of effort,” Juni shook her head. “In the hour or three it might take, we can get actual spirit herbs. That is what is important.”

Caolun gave the tree one last look, then sighed and nodded.

“Right, well, let’s move on and find somewhere to catch our breath for ten minutes,” Juni added.

“We can’t do that here?” he groaned, his legs and arms still sore from the swimming.

“That teleportation put a lovely qi beacon on this courtyard that says ‘stuff was here’,” Juni pointed out.

“Uhuh,” Meilan agreed.

“Quite. Standing around a recently triggered teleportation formation that isn’t on a ridgeline, picking your nose, is a great way to meet qi beasts,” Sir Huang added drily.

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~ JUN ARAI – PORTAM RHANAE UPPER TOWN ~

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“—On your left…”

Glancing sideways, in the direction Sana was half gesturing, Arai fought back a sigh and crouched a bit lower as she made her way through the tangle of slumped walls and half buried rooms.

“Spider?” she signed back, eyeing the shadow amid the vines that was entirely unmoving, but just ever so slightly… wrong, when she let her eyes slide past it.

Silently, Sana nodded, nocking an arrow—

The spider leapt, and was impaled through the thorax by Sana’s arrow.

Standing up, she picked her way over to it and used her blade to split its body lengthways, smoothly cutting out the core and then storing both body and core away.

“There are far too many spiders up here.” she muttered, looking around the ruined room in the upper portion of the town.

“Yeah, that makes twenty two so far,” Sana sighed. “For a full morning’s work, to have only found a handful spirit herbs over Soul Foundation is mildly pathetic.”

“I get the distinct impression that this place was quite well picked over,” she mused, carefully looking into the next room, which was a dead end. “Here is clear as well,” she added.

“Shall we head back to the upper plaza and see if the others have had any luck?” Sana suggested.

“Yeah…” she agreed, wiping water off her face.

That had been the story of the morning really. They had met scavenging qi beasts and found a lot of water running off the massif above, but basically no spirit herbs. Their solitary prize worth talking about in this last hour was a Nascent Soul willow orchid they had found growing on a back wall of this estate. There had been a few lingzhi in murky corners, a patch of golden star moss and a few vines, but that was about it really.

“Do you think this place has been cleaned out?” Sana mused as they passed back through the previous room and out into the courtyard.

“I am veering towards that conclusion, yes,” she conceded. “It could also be that there are too many qi beasts and that the ruins themselves are a problem.”

“It could be that,” Sana agreed with a sigh, waving away a cloud of bugs that were orbiting some spirit vines, feeding on the small, smelly berries on it.

That was the problem, really. People thought of this place as a cornucopia of riches, valleys full of spirit herbs, fruit trees with immortal peaches on every massif, lakes with mystical lotus and caves with ancient ruins a mere stones-throw in any direction. The reality was that it was wet, humid, full of bugs, and that spirit herbs were not as common as you might think.

Ruins were also a strange place to look for them. They were good for mushrooms, but also… very bad, because of mushrooms, though they had been quite lucky there, so far. Ruins also tended to have lots of qi beasts, because it was easy to eke out secure nests and territories there. In turn, that meant that spirit herbs were a hotly contested resource. Finding one usually meant finding either a herb problematic enough that the local fauna left it alone, or finding whatever fauna had enough strength to guard one while it reached maturity.

“We are done with this side…” she sent through their communication talisman to Senior Ying as they passed out of the gate of the ruined estate.

“Okay,” Ying replied after a moment. “We are also finishing up. Meet in the main plaza before the temple set into the cliff?”

“Yes, see you in five,” she confirmed.

“They are also on their way to the main plaza,” she added to Sana, who just nodded.

The trip back to the plaza through the misty streets was uneventful, thankfully. Arriving in the open area, before the massive rock-cut shrine, which was as impressive as anything she had ever seen up here, frankly, they could see Senior Ying, Lin Ling and Mu Shi sitting on the steps, with a two-metre-long… something.

“What is that?” Sana asked, even as she tried to work that out.

“The apex predator for this little bit of verdant hell,” Lin Ling said with a sigh as she stopped to admire it, divesting themselves of the packs of jars as they did so.

It had a vague resemblance to an alkyr, but the body was much more scorpion-like, though without the tail, and a quick count told her it had eight legs.

“Yin Lash Scorpion,” Senior Ying said with a grimace. “Rare, and rather dangerous, even by the standards of the usual fare up here.”

“This is a Lash Scorpion?” she murmured, looking at the segmented, armoured creature with its giant, crushing claws and spiny legs.

She had read about them in the pavilion records, but never seen one larger than her forearm before now. They were nocturnal hunters who prayed on other insects, centipedes, millipedes, spiders, alkyr, tetrids and so on. Their weapons of choice were the powerful crushing limbs with their mass of serrated teeth, either side of its head, and the ability to spray a vast cloud of stinking yin-attributed acid that even a tetrid stalker would be envious of.

“This is a Chosen Immortal one, which certainly explains the lack of much else in the way of qi beasts up here,” Mu Shi added. “It’s a female as well, so staying up here at night is even less appealing than it was when we only knew about the hook bats.”

“You say that, but we must have killed three dozen spiders sweeping the estates towards the cliff,” she mused. “Though probably they have come up from the flooded town below us.”

“I’d assume so,” Senior Ying mused.

“So, how come this was out in the day?” Sana asked, poking the corpse with her foot. “Aren’t they nocturnal hunters?”

“Yeah. I suppose it’s overcast enough for it to not be bothered,” Senior Ying mused, glancing up at the gloomy sky.

“That could certainly be the case,” she agreed, while Sana nodded.

“So, what did you find by way of spirit herbs?” Ling asked her.

“Willow Orchid,” she replied, crouching down to start dismantling the pack and put it with the other jars.

“A few lingzhi,” Sana added, also starting to unpack her stuff. “Some other odd bits of vine and stuff… a patch of gold star moss. Not as much as you might think. You?”

“A jasmine in one of the gardens off on the north side of this area,” Mu Shi added, gesturing to one of the new additions to the small stack of pots nearby. “Oh, and some spirit fruit. About twenty kilos of some species of tropical plum. We also found a tropical pomegranate tree, though without fruit.”

“There are quite a few pomegranate trees,” Senior Ying added. “And they match the motifs inside the large shrine behind us, so it’s possible they were originally associated with that?”

“Yeah, I could see that,” Mu Shi agreed.

“Did you go into the temple?” she asked, looking up at it, seeming slightly ethereal and otherworldly in the mist and the rain, with its dark openings and vine-covered columns.

“Not beyond the most cursory glance inside while waiting for Ling and Shi to come back earlier,” Senior Ying replied. “It has a spring inside it though, and the statues are… interesting, if that’s your thing. What I can read of the inscription over the doors says it is ‘The shrine of she who is greatest and most high, who sends up gifts and who is before all others—’.”

“It’s quite grandiose,” Mu Shi murmured.

“Yeah,” she agreed, looking up at the columns and rock-cut openings, hidden by vines and moss.

“Do we check it out next, or go up?” Sana asked.

“First things first, probably we send this lot back?” she suggested, eyeing the sum of their morning’s endeavour.

Before the fruits of their current short excursions, they had gotten a few flowering vines with interesting medicinal properties, some small boxes of spirit fruits, probably a dozen further small lingzhi, several ferns and a Nascent Soul water lotus that was an entirely accidental catch when sealing up the ferns in a wide area formation.

Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation.

“Yeah…” Senior Ying agreed. “I think we can probably use the first landing on the steps as a teleport point in any case.”

“I’ll get to setting that up then,” she volunteered, starting up the dozen or so broad rock-cut steps to get to the open paved area dominated by a semi-circular pool fed from the temple above.

“Okay,” Senior Ying agreed.

“Let’s start sorting this lot out then,” Mu Shi said standing up and stretching.

While the others worked on that, she spent the requisite few minutes performing the divinations and placing the formation jade and stable anchors.

“Shunfei, can we send stuff through to you?” she asked, sending Mo Shunfei a message.

“It’s Faolian,” a woman’s voice echoed through the link. “But yes, you can. What do you have to send?”

“Bunch of qi beasts, thirteen… fourteen herb pots and a few crates of spirit fruit.”

“A productive morning,” Ha Faolian remarked.

“It’s been okay,” she conceded. “Not as much as expected.”

“You are still ahead of most of the others, though Han Shu’s group has sent very little so far,” Faolian replied.

“So, can we send it immediately?” she asked, waving for the others to start moving the items onto the teleport point and link them with talismans.

“Give me five minutes. I will message you when you can send it,” Faolian replied.

“—Well?” Lin Ling asked her.

“Five mins apparently,” she replied, sitting down the edge of the low rampart stretching across the middle of the open space between the flights of steps.

“We might as well move the critter up, send it all through at once,” Mu Shi suggested.

“If we can, yeah,” Senior Ying agreed, eyeing it critically.

In the end, it was a bit less than five minutes before Faolian got back to her with the confirmation that they could send it. Linking up the last talismans, she watched as the entire load vanished in a twisting swirl of scattered rainbows and expanding air.

“Received?” she sent to Faolian.

“Yes, it’s…” Faolian confirmed, then trailed off before exclaiming, “—Is that Lash Scorpion?”

“Uhuh,” she confirmed, quietly pleased that it wasn’t just her and Sana who were a bit shocked.

“Yeesh,” Faolian murmured before adding, “Well, we will sort these out here. Good luck with the afternoon.”

“Thanks,” she replied, closing the link.

“So… shrine?” Lin Ling mused, looking up at the cavernous doorway.

Senior Ying nodded and set off up the stairs.

The ‘inscription’ that Senior Ying had noted was on a stele set into a broad, flat altar that dominated the middle of the small plaza at the top of the stairs.

The interior hall of the shrine, set into the cliff, was a semi-circular, column-lined cavern. All around the walls were alcoves with elegant, seated, feminine figures holding various objects. The centre of the hall, though, was what demanded your attention. There, on a platform at the back of a large, semi-circular pool, now almost overtaken by aquatic plants around the periphery, was a giant reclining statue of a woman. Carved from brilliant white marble, barely touched by weathering, she appeared to be lounging on a couch carved from the rocks, taking her ease, but at the same time watching the entrance.

Her hair had been picked out in reddish-gold marble. Her robe, fashioned of deep green marble, almost black in the gloom, draped across her lower body, somehow managing to give the illusion of concealing without ever really doing so. On her right hand, which was sensually outstretched, a dove was perched, while her left, which was almost trailing in the water, gently cradled a fish, as if it had just leapt from the pool.

The pool itself was fed from two waterfalls that gushed down on either side of the statue from jars held by secondary, naked female figures, also carved from white stone, but both with black hair and downcast eyes.

“Are those… serpents in her hair?” Mu Shi murmured, as they stood and stared at the remarkable figure, almost untouched by the slow encroachment of nature into this place.

Looking closely, she saw that Mu Shi was right; there were serpents twined in her hair, almost like a crown.

“It’s really rather similar in style to the one in Blue Water City,” Sana noted.

“The ‘Beautiful Schemer’ from the Queen Mother’s Temple?” Senior Ying mused.

“Yeah…” Sana said, looking around. “Even the layout is kind of similar.”

Pushing some qi into her ocular meridians, she tried to see if the female figure also had markings on her… but as far as she could see, the woman’s white skin was flawless and without additional ornamentation.

“There is a path up, beyond it on both sides,” Mu Shi added, looking around again.

“What do the inscriptions below the figures mean?” Lin Ling asked Senior Ying, pointing at a nearby one.

“Chloe… Green,” Senior Ying frowned, staring up at the female figure who was lounging on her ‘throne’, one hand at her breast, the other falling across her stomach. Her eyes were closed, lips parted… vines, flowers, and fruit were slowly blossoming out from beneath the throne itself and cascading down the stele.

“Is it just me… or is she…?” Mu Shi asked, raising an eyebrow at the sensual figure.

“Yes, it does seem that way,” Senior Ying agreed.

“And this one should be ‘beneath the… ground?” Sana said, squinting at the next figure’s inscription.

This figure gave a much more sombre sense, of renewal, with flowers blooming out of the altar as the figure crouched down to cup a hand to the earth, pouring water from a jar, the other caressing her stomach.

Walking on around the hall, there were two clear themes, she started to see. Some of the other statues were named things like ‘Deliverer of Gifts’, ‘Bearing Fruit’, ‘Warmth’, all seeming to evoke growth or prosperity in different ways. Others, however, were dark and complex, with titles like ‘Fury’, ‘Black’ and ‘Mistress’.

The next hall, off the right hand exit of that grand place, was actually half-flooded, the stream feeding the pool having spilled over when some part of the ceiling fell. Beyond that though, they found stairs up, which brought them out to… what she could only describe as a verdant paradise. The back half of the massif towered above them, waterfalls drifting down to feed a lake within which was a circular white stone building with a sealed door.

In a broad, open space before the lake was a large altar, on which were a few upturned bowls, scattered bones of what must once have been fish and some pieces of charcoal in a greyish puddle of rainwater.

“Did the monkeys leave that?” she asked, guessing wildly, eyeing the erected stone behind it, which was covered in red ochre handprints in all sorts of different sizes, none of them a cultivator’s.

“Yeah,” Senior Ying nodded, going over and turning the bowls back over and tidying up the damage done to it.

“It would have a pretty good view up the valley on a good day,” Mu Shi noted, looking beyond the lake, to where the far side had been carved open to form a colonnaded space looking north out of the massif, into the valley.

“I am surprised there are not more spirit herbs here…” Sana remarked, sheltering her eyes from the rain to look up at the cliffs.

“There is a pill bottle over here…” Lin Ling said, holding one up.

“Because of course…” she sighed, feeling a bit ashamed of cultivators in general suddenly.

“I think we should just leave this place as it is,” Senior Ying said, finishing cleaning up the altar and bowing to the white building in the lake.

“Yeah,” she agreed, looking around.

There were no obvious stairs up, so after looking around a bit more, they departed again and checked the other side. The left hand exit took them down, into a gloomy cavern that was half-flooded. The far exit was just about visible above the water, but none of them felt like voluntarily going and looking at it. The creepy carvings in the hall didn’t help either. They were dominated by scenes of hooded women placing bodies in the ground, while men planted crops which grew, nourished by them. The corpses all had ecstatic faces as they were slowly consumed by the roots of plants.

“So what now… do we try to scale the actual massif?” she mused as they made their way back to the grand hall. “That was the original plan…”

“There are paths up it, to those higher ruins we saw,” Sana reminded her. “There was one beyond the estate we cleared last: steps up the cliff to a higher terrace.”

“I suppose we should check them out at least,” Mu Shi remarked. “If only so we can ensure someone else doesn’t waste time doing it later?”

“Aye,” Senior Ying agreed. “Gathering herbs out there should be fine anyway. It is just this place where it is perhaps inadvisable.”

Heading back outside, they paused to put some basic feng shui protections around the teleport formation, before setting off in search of the stairs up the massif again. Having been the ones who found them before, she and Sana took the lead this time, escorting the others quickly down overgrown streets almost entirely without incident, to arrive at a smaller courtyard dominated by a sprawling building constructed right against the massif.

“This… is another shrine?” Mu Shi remarked, looking up at the peaked roofs and column fronted buildings.

“We didn’t go any further than this before,” Sana said. “So maybe?”

“It does have that ‘look’, though,” she agreed, starting up the steps. “These lower buildings are all empty and overgrown though. Beyond the wall carvings, which are very… typical, I suppose, there is barely even any pottery?”

“I see, so they build this into an overhang, and then it loops around above us?” Priestess Ying mused, peering into one of the buildings, an empty two room affair with a lot of moss and a vine growing out of a crack in the ceiling. The front room had a block in the middle carved a bit like an altar.

“Yeah,” she nodded, leading them on, towards where the stairs turned.

“There is writing on this one…” Lin Ling, noted, pausing by one they had just passed.

“So there is…” Sana mused, squinting up at it.

“Tomb of Aperius… Family?” Senior Ying frowned.

“These are tombs?” she blinked, pausing to consider the room beside her.

“Hmmm… This one is for a ‘Kastus’,” Senior Ying murmured, carefully walking inside, skirting around the altar to look into the inner room. “It looks like a shrine, mostly. There are names below some of the carvings in the wall? But it’s all solid, or it looks like it.”

“A place where they came and gave offerings perhaps?” Mu Shi suggested, making an auspicious sign.

“—and the carvings on the walls are… pictures of their lives?” she guessed, looking at the nearest one which depicted a woman holding two children and laughing.

“Like a scroll of life and death… but built as a shrine,” Senior Ying agreed, completing her circuit of the small room.

They all traipsed back out again, and looked up the cliff.

“Did they turn the whole massif into a tomb field for the town?” she asked at last.

“It could well be,” Senior Ying mused. “Do you still want to go up?”

“What do you think?” she asked, torn on that point.

Lin Ling just shrugged, as did Mu Shi.

“Hard to say,” Senior Ying sighed. “I want to say ‘so long as we are respectful, there will be no issues’, but at the same time, I know a few things about old tombs…”

“Let’s take it carefully then,” Sana said. “These appear long opened anyway, if they were ever closed.”

“Yes, these are more akin to memorial shrines,” she agreed. “I’ve seen waystations not that dissimilar as well…”

“Shi, Ling?” she asked the other two.

“Let’s take it slowly,” Mu Shi said, looking up at the cliff above.

“Uh-huh,” Lin Ling agreed.

“I’ll take the lead then,” Senior Ying said, moving past her.

Nodding, she picked up the pace to walk behind Senior Ying, Sana, Ling and Mu Shi, falling in behind without further comment.

Like that, they spent almost the next thirty minutes, ascending the stairs into the low cloud, walking up through the various shrines, of which there had to be dozens, of varying size, she came to realise. They found a few spirit herbs as well, though nothing hugely spectacular, it had to be said, until finally Senior Ying led them out into a broad plaza, set into a depression in the side of the massif, dominated by a half tumbled down circle of twelve columns that held a very gnarled looking pomegranate spirit tree at its heart.

“Well… this is different,” Mu Shi remarked, as they took in the semicircle of much fancier ‘shrines’ ringing it, and the steps ascending up in the middle, through what appeared to be a fissure splitting open the side of the massif.

“Yeah…” she agreed, looking warily at the spirit tree.

“That’s an old tree,” Sana murmured.

“It is, isn’t it,” Senior Ying mused, looking at it respectfully.

Spirit trees were strange things, in that it could be very hard to tell which ones were sentient and which were not. This one seemed… un-awakened? But there was still a faint sense of… discomfort as she took in their surroundings.

“Hey… Arai?” Lin Ling, who had been, staring around at the swirling low cloud murmured, pointing towards one of the ‘shrines’ off to their left.

“What is it?” she asked, looking but not seeing anything.

“I thought I saw…” Lin Ling frowned. “I dunno… it was like a shadow, or something?”

“Senior Ying?” she got the attention of the older woman, who had been contemplating the tree from a suitable distance.

“Yes?” Ying asked.

“I saw something, in that shrine, or thought I did,” Ling said, still staring at it. “A shadow?”

“…”

Pursing her lips, Senior Ying gave the tree one final look, then bowed slightly and headed over to the shrine that had caught Ling’s attention, the rest of them following along warily.

“Ah… that would be it…” Mu Shi muttered, even before Ling could remark on the badly degraded white and gold talisman stuck on the altar inside.

“…”

Looking back at where they had been, she frowned.

-There is no way this should have been visible to Ling from where we were standing…

“…”

Senior Ying eyed the shrine’s outer doorway then carefully walked inside.

“Huh…” she called out softly, after a moment. “It’s safe to come in, but touch nothing.”

Wondering about that, she warily walked inside…

Much like the smaller, much plainer ones below, this tomb had an antechamber with a large altar in the middle. The wall at the back held four alcoves, each with a statue of a sitting figure, three men and a woman, dressed in flowing white gowns edged with purplish stone, crowns of leaves around their heads. The left hand man held an axe bundled up in sticks in one hand and a stele in the other. The woman next to him had a child, a boy and a girl, cradled in each of her arms. The third, an austere man with short hair and a serious expression, held a map and a sword, a strange set of armour set at his feet.

The last, on the right side, had a scholarly demeanour, close-cropped beard and short, dark hair. In one hand he held a scroll, while in the other he held a simple stone rod. By his feet was a bowl filled with fruit. Unlike the others, though, his robe was trimmed with red and green, and the stole across his shoulders decorated in black stone and golden trefoil leaves.

The ‘stele’, about a metre tall by half a metre wide, beneath all but one of the figures, the man holding the map, had been taken out and smashed to pieces. Beyond them, were dark, unwelcoming voids that her qi-vision could not penetrate.

“Cultivators opened these… and recently?” Sana murmured, eyeing the talisman warily then looking at the door.

“They did… and this is a proper tomb,” Senior Ying added, sounding disgusted. “The inscription below the statue on the right says ‘Qin… Qintus Caius Valtus – Servant of Life’.”

Looking at the stele below the man holding the map, it was possible to see where someone had hit it really rather hard.

“I wonder why they failed to open that one?” Lin Ling asked, looking around uneasily.

“It could be that the others were already broken open…” Senior Ying suggested, crouching down to peer inside the right hand one.

“Ah, true,” Ling sighed, eyeing the scattered fragments of the other stele.

They watched in silence as she carefully stepped through, into the interior, for a moment. Involuntarily, she found her hand drifting to where the life-bound talisman mark was—

“It’s okay. There is some inauspicious aura, but they really did a thorough job on it,” Senior Ying called out after a moment.

They watched, relieved as she slipped back out again and stood up, dusting herself off.

“All that is in there is a slab and a few empty shelves. Everything has been taken,” Senior Ying said with a grimace. “That said, I take it back. This was done recently. There is basically no evidence of damp in there, compared to what you might expect if it had been open for years,”

“Why leave the talisman as evidence though?” she asked, looking around at them again.

“Not to mention there are two pill bottles chucked in the grass outside,” Mu Shi called over.

“I guess stealth was not their concern,” Senior Ying sighed, picking up the bits of the stele and putting them on the altar.

She watched as she re-arranged them quickly.

“This says… ‘The Tomb of Qintus Caius Valtus – Master of Life, who took as brothers… Sem’—that bit is missing; it’s where the stele fractured, so maybe ‘Sempus’, or ‘Semporus?’— ‘Cornelius and Caecil’—again that bit is missing, rather vexingly. The last bit says he married a woman called Claudia Minor and that he was buried here, rather than in ‘Sun’s Gate’, wherever that is, after falling victim to the Prophetess of… Orcus when she plotted against the town.”

“What of the others?” Sana asked.

“The woman is called Alicia Arella Valtus; all it says is that she was a good mother and loving wife to Terrius Caius Valtus, and that she was gifted and a pleasure to all. The soldier is ‘Terrius Caius Valtus’, who founded this town, while the other man is Qintus Terrius Valtus, his son, who was… the region governor for many years,” Senior Ying mused. “Qintus Caius Valtus must be a relation, but it doesn’t say what. All of them were apparently killed by this female prophet of ‘Orcus’.”

“Well, I suppose we should check the others?” Lin Ling muttered.

“Yeah…” Senior Ying agreed with a sigh.

----------------------------------------

~ HA YUN – PORTAM RHANAE LOWER TOWN ~

----------------------------------------

“I swear… they are doing this deliberately…” Ha Caolun grumbled under his breath. “Don’t you agree, Yun?”

“…”

Standing up to his waist in turgid flood water, holding an earth-attributed formation core and fighting off a headache and nausea brought about by borderline qi-exhaustion, Ha Yun tried to tune out Ha Caolun’s ‘conversation’, and focus purely on the ‘moment’.

“I mean… they split us up… have us doing all this stuff, and for what?” Caolun continued, from where he was crouched, dry on a mossy block.

“—Caolun,” he muttered, “can you give me the compass reading?”

“Eh… it’s what it was before,” Caolun barely glanced at the compass on the rock beside him.

-The same, eh?

Somehow he doubted that.

Exhaling, he focused on the core in his hands, trying not to feel like he was about to vomit as qi twisted in his meridians.

“Huh… Yun, there are actually carvings on the walls of this hall, kind of interesting ones as well…”

Refocusing on his surroundings, he found Caolun had gotten off his rock and was taking in some of the relief carvings set into the wall. A few scattered vines drifted in the water where he had cut them away to get a better look.

“See, is this woman actually…?”

He stared at where Caolun was pointing and found that the female figure was indeed vigorously coupling with a man in a quite alluring position.

“…”

The qi flow through the core in his hands abruptly ramped up.

“Are you sure it’s the same?” he grimaced.

The core in his hands faintly hummed.

“…”

Gritting his teeth, he took a hand away and quickly withdrew a spirit jade, pushing it into the talisman. The formation node greedily ate the precious spirit crystal, and he got a brief moment of respite—

“—Please?” he growled to Caolun, “can I see it?”

“Ahh… see?” Caolun waded back over to him and grabbed the compass he had left on his rock for him to look at.

It was basically the same as before; however, the orientation of the reading was… marginally inauspicious, rather than the other way around.

“It’s trending inauspicious…” he pointed out, trying not to sound as annoyed as he felt.

“Eh… it wasn’t doing that a moment ago,” Caolun muttered, at least having the grace to be embarrassed on that point.

Looking around warily in case the spirit herb, some kind of vine, was trying to move in their—

“Spider… above us,” he hissed, half nodding at a bluish-purple, furred spider the size of a small cat that was creeping through the vines above them on one of the few remaining roof arches.

Caolun looked up and scowled, sending a wave of Intent-infused qi at it. The spider fled back into the vines, barely harmed, scattering a small cloud of blue hairs that the rain swept away.

“…”

Abruptly, the stress on the formation lessened.

-Thank the fates for that, he thought to himself, taking a deep breath.

“It seems they are done,” he said, taking a further deep breath to try and push away the nausea and lightheadedness from the qi exhaustion.

“About time,” Caolun sighed.

“Next time, you do this,” he muttered, looking around at their surroundings as the node stabilized properly at last.

“Eh… I did the last one,” Caolun replied blandly. “And that took far longer than this…”

-Yes, and it also took about a tenth of the effort, he added to himself.

“YOU CAN STOP MANUALLY FOCUSING ON THE FORMATION NOW!” Meilan called from the courtyard where the vine had been lurking about ten metres, and two walls away.

Putting it down on a handy rock, he relinquished direct control over the node and looked around again with a grimace.

-I dunno what is worse, he reflected, that he is angering me to tears, or that I understand entirely where he is coming from…

Really, he would much rather have done this with Leng, but the sad fact was that both his and Leng’s foundations, not to mention their acclimatization, were simply better than Caolun’s. It was surprising how much difference two or three rotations of a core made up here in terms of the stamina and qi control.

Subsequently, Caolun was a distant fourth when it came to who used formations cores, only ahead of Kun Juni, who usually directed the formations or captured the herbs and Sir Huang, who was the other, much more competent guard.

Vexingly, Caolun was absolutely fine with this arrangement. Standing around holding a bow or a sword all day, grumbling incessantly about how Elder Quanbo had still not yet messaged him about something or other, was something Caolun was turning out to be very good at. As for himself, he wasn’t sure if it was Caolun’s inaction or the fact that he had not spotted that ‘easy’ position himself that was annoying him more.

There was some splashing off in the distance, and then Juni appeared in the doorway ahead of them.

“All good here?” she asked, looking around.

“Nothing unexpected,” he replied, which was about all he could bring himself to say at this point. “A spider… came to see what was what.”

“This is probably the last one anyway,” Juni added.

“You said that the last two times,” Caolun grumbled. “And yet here we are…”

“…”

Kun Juni gave Caolun a long look, then sighed.

“Well, bring your core and follow me,” she said, ignoring Caolun’s comment entirely or so it seemed.

Grimacing, he waded after her, through the doorway and across the next room, fighting the feeling of numbness in his legs.

That was the story of the day really. They had actually ‘finished up’ before this, but on their way to the rendezvous point set up by Priestess Ying’s team, further into the town, their compasses had all registered vaguely auspicious signatures… and now here he was, up to his waist in floodwater, holding a formation as they sealed a spirit herb he had not actually laid eyes on yet.

The chill in the water here was palpable due to the continuous current. To stay standing in it for long periods, especially deeper water like this, claiming it as unpleasant, was probably underselling it. It did something profoundly subtle to his body, making his already non-existent qi-recovery somehow worse. In extreme cases, it even bled qi out of him, and nothing he could do would stop it.

Juni led them on, through another doorway and out into a large, flooded plaza full of tangled vines and half submerged shrubs, surrounded by colonnade-fronted buildings. At its heart was a semi-circular, shrine-like construction. What immediately drew the eye, beyond Sir Huang bundling up a remarkably common-looking vine with greenish-gold, trefoil leaves into a large pot, was the white marble statue of a reclining woman within the building.

“Isn’t that, like, a common vine we have seen all over?” Caolun muttered, eyeing it as they walked over.

“Yes,” Juni nodded. “But this one just made the jump from spirit vegetation to herb…”

Looking around, he saw Leng and Meilan also arriving. Leng looked about as bad has he did. Meilan… looked as if she had barely had any difficulty, which a part of him thought was deeply unfair, even if she was likely several realms above him.

“—What shall I do with this?” he asked, holding up the core.

“Oh yeah, we will bind the pot,” Meilan said, waving for him to bring it over.

Following her directions, he set the formation jade into a handy setting on the pot and placed a talisman over the top to hold it in place. Leng followed suit, at which point touching the pot gave a faint sense of oppression.

“There is nowhere easy to teleport this back, is there?” Meilan muttered, looking around.

“No… there is not,” Juni agreed, looking around. “That said, we are nearly at the teleport formation Arai’s group set up in the upper town, earlier on. We will take this and the other three pots up there and then take stock. Although it doesn’t feel like it, we have been at this a whole day.”

“So, are we stopping here then?” Caolun asked, again, clearly intending to draw a reply out of Juni in front of Sir Huang and Meilan this time, for all the good it would do he suspected.

“I think so; it’s nearly dusk,” Juni replied, after staring at the gloomy, grey cloud above them. “Everyone is exhausted as well.”

“No argument there,” he muttered, taking out a piece of fish wrapped in persis leaves that he had kept from lunch and savouring a mouthful.

A subtle buzz of qi and invigorating Intent from the food flowed through him, helping him perk up a bit.

“Thank the fates,” Caolun muttered under his breath.

“…”

“—What’s with the statue?” he asked, changing the topic before Caolun ran his mouth off too much.

It was certainly striking: a beautiful, reclining naked female figure, carved from white stone that had mostly resisted the depredations of age, her posture as she lounged on her seat… somehow reminded him of an alluring courtesan, or a seductress. She had golden hair, picked out in a different stone, and blue eyes, which gazed distantly at the plaza. Her left hand trailed in her lap, holding a garland of flowers and trefoil leaves, while her right rested upon a lantern that sat on the arm of her seat.

“Yeah…” Caolun walked over to look at it. “I would have thought anything of value would have long since been taken?”

“Setting aside that this place is not that accessible, you cannot teleport statues usually,” Sir Huang said drily. “Most of what you see was dragged out manually or found in places not currently part of the suppression.”

“Oh…” Caolun grimaced and nodded.

When it was put like that, the answer was kind of obvious really.

“What does the text say?” Leng asked, pointing to the barely visible words on the base of the statue.

Sweeping away a few of the vines coiling around it, Sir Huang stared at it for a moment.

“Maiden of the Gardens, Smile-Loving Daughter of the Heart,” he said at last.

“Does that mean this place was an ornamental garden?” Meilan mused, looking around.

“It would certainly explain the muddy quagmire and lack of paving that covers half of it,” Sir Huang agreed.

“Smile-Loving… isn’t that a sideways way of saying ‘a woman who likes sex’ in Easten?” Caolun added. “The carvings in the room we were in were all about it as well… Is this a brothel?”

“…”

Sir Huang stared around at the buildings and sighed wryly. “Possibly?”

“Since when do you know Easten?” he muttered.

He had been made to learn it when he was younger, on the grounds that as the son of a clan lord he would be expected to treat with people from the east, and they loved to write formal documents in the old archaic versions of it. Mostly, according to his father, because it annoyed imperial bureaucrats no end, due to Archaic Easten being older than even the Formal Imperial dialect.

“Fairy Fire-Blossom taught me a few words,” Caolun replied, without any shame.

-I’m not sure whether to be impressed or disgusted at your ability to say that without any difficulties, he thought to himself.

“…”

Meilan just rolled her eyes, while Juni sighed.

“Well, we are done here, anyway,” Juni added after a moment. “Let’s gets get moving. Given the number of drowned things out here, I don’t want to be wading around in flood water after dark.”

“Quite…” Sir Huang agreed. “Today has been more painless than I expected. Let’s not test its limits too much.”

“You call this… painless?” Caolun grimaced.

“The worst thing we have seen is this vine, basically,” Sir Huang said, kicking the slightly rocking pot gently.

“The spider corpses at the start were a close second,” Juni pointed out.

“Was that today?” Sir Huang said blandly.

“…”

“Oh Senior Brother,” Meilan sighed, patting him on the arm.

Shaking her head, Juni considered the map and then pointed off to their right. “If we go this way, we will get back to the main street, then we can go up it, to the upper town. It’s not as far as it looks.”

Despite that assertion, it still took them nearly ten minutes of trudging through largely knee-deep flood waters to finally arrive at the entrance to the upper town, built on a large, uplifted area in the shadow of the massif pillar. Access was via a large gate at a low point in the cliff, the rising street beyond being a broad boulevard as large as any in West Flower Picking Town.

The upper town certainly lived up to its name as well, as far as he could see. The construction here was more grandiose, the blocks bigger and the carvings more widespread, where you could see them beneath the blanket of green over everything.

“The buildings up here are certainly a lot grander,” Leng remarked as they considered a colonnade of tumbled columns at the front of one estate.

“They are…” Caolun agreed, adjusting the spirit herb pot he was carrying with a grimace. “Why couldn’t we have come up here?”

“It’s not like we didn’t find a lot down there,” he pointed out, looking around at the overgrown ruins either side of the street.

Their haul for the day had actually been very respectable once he started really totalling it up. Despite it feeling like all they had done was wade through knee or waist deep water and channel qi into formations cores, they had captured nineteen spirit herbs and recovered a lot of drowned qi-beasts in the process.

“It would have gotten us out of the water at least…” Caolun grumbled, stamping a foot down to emphasise the ‘squelch’ sound it made as he walked, before answering: “Yeah, but it will be a miracle if I don’t mutate fins.”

“Rather than that, it’s the temperature difference,” Leng muttered, glancing back in the direction of the flooded lower town, now lost in the haze of misty rain.

“You say that, but all I see here is a place less likely to have drowned all its troublesome qi beasts,” he muttered.

“…”

Caolun and Leng both looked at him, then at the surroundings and grimaced.

“Though yes, it is nice not to feel like my balls are freezing off,” he agreed.

“—Hey Juni, you’re here! And looking only slightly drowned!”

Looking ahead, he found Lin Ling, looking annoyingly cheerful, and Mu Shi, both making their way out of a side street carrying a few pots slung between them.

“How have you done?” Juni asked them as Arai, Sana and Senior Ying appeared behind Mu Shi a moment later.

“We got up as far as the paths on the massif allow,” Mu Shi answered. “There were quite a few spirit herbs up there, but also an annoying number of qi beasts. This whole area has become a refuge for things pushed out of the town.”

“Anything impressive?” Leng asked.

“A ‘yin lash scorpion’, before lunch,” Arai replied with a sigh.

“Herbs have mostly been vines, epiphytes and the various lingzhi,” Sana added.

“A lash scorpion?” he repeated dully. “As in… the things that eat roaches?”

“Uh-huh,” Lin Ling nodded.

“…”

“There were two alkyr up on the massif as well,” Arai added.

“What about the odds of there being a nest of them up there?” Juni asked.

“Eh… hard to say,” Arai replied, while the others, even Priestess Ying, all agreed with various noncommittal gestures. “The massif is quarried all the way through, though most is inaccessible, beyond the shrine ahead of us.”

“The inscriptions suggest it’s an old tomb field,” Priestess Ying added. “Family tombs for the town and such, along with the odd shrine and probably buildings for those who tended them.”

“A tomb field?” Sir Huang frowned, staring up at the massif with a complex expression.

“Yeah, best we leave it well alone,” Priestess Ying murmured. “We found pill bottles and talismans in and some tombs were broken open recently.”

“Define recently?” Sir Huang asked, frowning.

“Months to a year, maybe?” Kun Juni replied. “The Beast Hunters told us two groups of ‘experts’ investigated the Western Falls Valley and were up here back then.”

“They were,” Priestess Ying nodded, “though I only saw them very briefly.”

“So, the lack of spirit herbs here… could be because they already cleaned it out?” Leng asked, frowning.

The others mostly shrugged, which wasn’t much of an answer really.

The herb hunters chattered away quietly as they made their way onwards, largely ignoring the three of them.

“What do you make of that?” Caolun muttered to them as they trudged on.

“Make of what?” he asked, honestly too tired to make conversation at this point.

“That there are ruins up here that might have—”

“Tombs, tombs up here,” he corrected Caolun pointedly. “That cultivators already took a crack at robbing.”

“But we have a lot of resources here…” Caolun murmured.

“…”

“Forget it,” he muttered, being too tired for any of this nonsense.

“I am with Yun here,” Leng muttered, agreeing with him. “This place is already dangerous enough without us tempting that kind of trouble. You know the stories about ruins up here...”

“Bleugh, Brother Yun, Brother Leng, where is your sense of adventure?” Caolun sighed. “Not to mention, they are being really cagy about talking around us…”

“What are you saying?” Leng frowned.

“The forces we have up here… you think this is just for some herb hunting?” Caolun muttered. “You think the Ha clan sends out the Cherry Wine Pagoda for mere herbs?”

“It’s cute that you think the Ha clan can send out the Cherry Wine Pagoda at all…” Meilan, who had been bring up the rear, snickered.

“You are a Ha clan influence,” Ha Caolun pointed out. “As a member of it, who is not of the clan, shouldn’t you speak respectfully to your superiors?”

“…”

Meilan gave Caolun a long look, then gave him a faintly mocking bow.

“Anyway, walk quicker,” she added, making a shooing motion at the three of them. “The others are going to leave us behind.”

Glancing ahead, he saw that that was the case, their pace had picked up noticeably while they had been talking.

Sighing, he picked up the pace, closing the distance again to the others.

“—So, this is the main plaza?” Sir Huang was saying as they caught up, just as the group left the boulevard and entered a broad open space in the shadow of the massif.

“Yep,” Senior Ying nodded.

“…”

“That is an impressive shrine,” Leng muttered, eyeing the greenery draped columns at the base of the cliff.

“Yeah,” he murmured, taking in the carvings and the statues set into the cliff, where they were visible through the vines and trees.

“If you want to dump the herbs on the first layer of the steps, we will set up the formation,” Jun Arai said to Kun Juni as they started up the steps.

Following along behind, he dumped his own pack down where instructed and rolled his shoulders. Caolun followed suit, his gaze lingering on the open doorway above them.

“The shrine is worth taking a look inside,” Sana added to Juni.

“The statue in the pool is certainly something,” Lin Ling agreed.

“Yun… Leng, Caolun… do you want to help me with these pots?” Meilan asked, snagging his arm on the way past.

“…”

“What do we have to do?” Leng asked, looking at the pots. “Same as before?”

“Yep! Just put them around the teleport point and attach talismans…” Meilan said. “Once we are done, we can go look at the pretty statues…”

“…”

Caolun, who that was clearly aimed at, pretended not to notice.

He watched Meilan once, to be sure it was the same process he knew, then started going along the pots putting talismans on them while Leng followed behind, completing the marks to link them.

Once that was done, it was amusing to watch Caolun almost skip up the steps after Juni, Sana and Ling who had already gone ahead to look.

“The allure of ruins is really too strong with some people,” Meilan murmured as they walked up the steps after him.

“This trial has everyone thinking of stupid stuff,” Sir Huang sighed.

“It does, doesn’t it, Senior Brother?” Meilan agreed with a wistful sigh.

“This is not quite what was expected though,” Leng muttered. “I mean, you hear talk of ruins in the forests up here, but this…”

They paused to look back over the ruined town, nestled in the valley between the massif and the rising cliffs on the far side, which was basically just missing roofs when you got down to it.

“This is not that atypical,” Sir Huang said. “Though it’s a sight less dangerous than the other two I’ve seen.”

“It would be worse were it not for the flooding,” Priestess Ying, who was walking up behind Sir Huang, remarked.

“What… do you make of those tombs you saw?” Sir Huang asked her.

“Hum…. It’s hard to say,” Priestess Ying mused, staring up at the massif, presumably in their general direction. “The ‘inauspicious alignments’ in this place are eroded by untold millennia, so probably they are not that dangerous. However, artefacts up here tend to be fairly ‘all or nothing’.”

“Meaning?” he asked, curious.

“Well, things up here either kill you without you ever understanding how… or turn out to be an unbreakable stone pot,” Priestess Ying said with a nasty chuckle. “Very little between them.”

“Ah…”

He was about to say more, when they finally got to the top of the stairs and he got his first good look at the interior of the shrine…

“That is…”

“Impressive?” Senior Ying murmured.

“Very,” Leng whispered as they walked through the doorway and into the cavernous interior.

“How… is something like this not known about?” he asked, staring at the white-jade beauty with red-golden hair reclining in the lake, a dove in one hand and a fish leaping from the water in the other.

“It’s not exactly in a place anyone can just walk into,” Meilan remarked drily.

“That’s fair,” he conceded, taking in the whole cavernous grotto.

Caolun was wandering around the edge of the pool, looking around with interest.

“There is basically nothing here you would care to mess with, though,” Priestess Ying added. “There is a shrine further in, but that was looted by the same cultivators who opened the tombs up above, we think.”

“A tended shrine…” Sir Huang repeated, a certain edge entering his voice as he looked around.

“Monkey see, monkey do, monkey catch you, maybe break your legs too,” Priestess Ying murmured.

“The… monkeys tend shrines up here?” he asked, not quite sure he had caught that right.

“Oh yes,” Priestess Ying agreed. “And few really give them the respect they deserve.”

“Mostly because those who do not rarely live to tell of their stupidity,” Sir Huang added.

In the end, they poked around the cavernous shrine for a good ten minutes before it became clear that the sun was properly setting. At that point, they decided to cut the investigation short and headed back down to the teleport formation. Standing around the node, waiting for the formation to charge up, it was hard not to feel a certain degree of relief, at last that the day was over.

“Everyone good?” Juni called out.

“Yes,” he replied, adding his own confirmation to the chorus of affirmations as she checked nobody was doing something like stand on the edge of the field.

“Three… two… one…” Juni counted down—

The misty rain swirled around them, scattering strange shadows in the gloomy haze of dusk, reforming into the platform outside the Misty Jasmine Inn.

“Welcome back.”

Once their surroundings had stabilized, he found Ha Faolian and Mo Shunfei, along with a few guards, waiting for them.

“Are Han Shu’s group back yet?” Kun Juni asked, grabbing a pair of herb jars and walking off the platform.

“Yes, back about twenty minutes ago, looking like they wanted to die,” Diaomei replied.

Looking around, he quickly grabbed a few of the lighter herb jars and started to shuttle them off the platform.

“What the fates is that?!” Ha Caolun exclaimed, pointing abruptly a two metre long scorpion like thing lying next to the butchery tent, that looked awfully like a…

“Oh, that? That’s the yin lash scorpion we killed in the Upper Town,” Lin Ling remarked blandly, glancing over at it.

“That’s…” He stared at the two metre long monstrosity with its forelimbs as thick as his legs and shuddered.

“So… the non-flooded bits would have been easier, eh?” Leng muttered, poking Caolun in the back because he had stopped on the steps down from the teleport formation.

“Hey!” Caolun complained, although not that hard.

“What realm is that?” he asked, eyeing it.

“Chosen Immortal,” Lin Ling added with aplomb.

“…”

Caolun stared at her dully, then back at the monstrosity, his face inscrutable.

“Come on,” he chivvied Caolun. “The faster we move these, the faster we can go get freshened up. With any luck, the misbegotten saps who stayed here will have to clear up.”

“How quickly you become one of the ‘field’ crowd’,” Meilan murmured, passing by him.

“…”

Caolun eyed him, then the pots, then sighed and nodded.

In the end, it took them about ten minutes to store away most of the relevant bits and pieces in the storehouse. At that point Caolun left, claiming he needed to enquire about this mysterious communication from Elder Quanbo that he had been ‘expecting’ all day, so he and Leng made their exit and headed first to their rooms to divest themselves of their horrible, muddy clothes then to the bath.

By the time they got there, Ha Ding, Ha Jiao, Ha Mun and Ha Mao were all already in it, lounging around, drinking wine and looking half-dead.

“Oh… you two survived!” Ha Ding called over, as they entered.

“Yeah, we survived,” Leng sighed, stripping off his light robe.

“Did Caolun die?” Ha Mao asked sounding amused.

“No, he went to check on some communication,” he shrugged, also stripping off and slipping into the water after Ha Leng…

“Aiii….” he sighed deeply, feeling a bit of the stress fade away.

“How was the trip through the forests?” Leng asked.

“If I ever see another formation core again, I will have a psyche break,” Jiao groaned.

“Yep, I curse all formation cores and their nine-generations!” Ding agreed. “Why couldn’t we have gone with you… at least you got to be with Fairy Juni and Fairy Meilan?”

Leng just snorted in laughter.

“You want to know how our day started?” he grumbled.

“…”

“—We spent an hour hauling dead ‘false shadow spitter’ spiders out of a flooded basement to get at a lingzhi,” Leng said. “Caolun nearly killed himself finding the basement as well.”

“As in.. the ones that have the hallucinogenic blood that they put in illicit love pills?” Ha Mun asked.

“That’s the species,” he agreed. “A whole nest, with a Quasi-Immortal queen… I think?”

“Yeah, I think… it was so long ago, even my memory won’t play ball,” Leng groaned, lying back in the water.

“—Dinner will be in an hour apparently…”

He turned in the water to find that Caolun had appeared, holding a bottle of wine, looking a bit jaded.

“Did you get your message from Elder Quanbo?” he asked.

“Bleugh…” Caolun sighed, stripping off his own robe to sit down the shallows. “Fanjing said that Elder Quanbo was invited to a meal with someone important… He spent the whole day socializing.”

“…”

“So in the end, coming with us was for the best,” Leng remarked. “You got to see a few cool things, at least…”

“Yeah… I guess,” Caolun conceded. “That statue was really something…”

“Statue?” Ha Ding asked.

“Oh, there were a few,” Caolun said, waving his hand and producing a shimmering image of the one from where the vine was. “This was in some ancient brothel… They even had these explicit carvings on the wall…”

“You went and caught spirit herbs in a ruined brothel…” Ha Ding laughed.

“…”

Leaving them to discuss… that, he swam across the far side of the pool to be alone with his own thoughts. It was not that he didn’t want to be sociable, it was simply that having listened to Caolun talk large all day, he didn’t now need to listen to Caolun reframe their day’s exploits through the prism of naked statues.

It was also nice to just drift in the pool, enjoying the relaxing warmth of the water and marvelling at how it was almost the Yang to the Yin of the flood waters in that regard.

By the time he surfaced from his reverie, which could not really be called an attempt at actual cultivation, as that was basically impossible up here for a spiritual cultivator, he found that Ding and the others had all departed. Presumably to play dice or Gu Takes All before dinner.

“So… this is where you came to lurk?”

He sat up with a splash and found Ha Meilan sitting, naked, on the side of the pool, looking at him with amusement, splashing her long legs in the water idly.

“Do you just like tormenting me?” he grumbled. “Anyway, I thought all the girls went to this other pool, in the shrine?”

“Oh, yeah, they are young and pure and understandably leery of you horrid lot,” Meilan remarked, before offering him a fruit. “—Mangosteen, by the way, they are very nice…”

“Ah… no thanks,” he declined, not being a huge fan of them. “—And yet you are here?”

“Well, it’s just us here; most of the others are now getting ready for dinner,” Meilan replied. “The pool in the shrine is not that big, anyway… and I just came here to get freshened up.”

“Oh,” he stood and splashed some water on his face.

“As to tormenting you, as funny as that would be, I don’t see you not looking, ‘Junior Brother’.”

“How long is it until dinner?” he asked to change the topic quickly.

“Twenty minutes maybe?” she replied, before slipping into the water and submerging herself fully for a moment.

She resurfaced a moment later with a gasp and flipped her hair back, scattering water everywhere.

“Really, this place is a marvel,” she sighed, drifting in the water. “Without it…”

“Will we be doing more of the same tomorrow?” he asked after they had sat there in silence for some minutes.

“Probably,” she nodded. “If the massif is what it is, then probably we will either be clearing more of the town, or looking to go further up the valley. It really depends what your lot’s recovery is like.”

“They would leave Ding and the rest here and take Caolun or Wufan’s group to do that?” he asked.

“Maybe?” she mused. “Although as you saw today, it’s not as easy as it looks.”

“No… it is not,” he conceded, sitting back and staring at the ceiling of the baths.

They sat there in silence for a few more minutes, until he finally decided he should go to his room and get sorted out for dinner.

“I’ll see you at dinner,” he said to Meilan, hauling himself out of the pool and starting to quickly dry himself off without exposing himself to her.

“I suppose I should go see about that as well,” Meilan sighed, standing up as well and pulling herself out.

Unable to help himself, he found himself watching her towel herself off as she walked around the edge of the pool, feeling a little regretful as she finally put her robe on.

Probably she saw him looking, but didn’t say anything, which just made him feel even more… complicated. He was pretty sure she wasn’t flirting with him, especially having seen her banter with Sir Huang, but even so…

Giving himself a shake, he followed her out of the baths and into the empty ante-hall. They had just got to the stairs up, when she paused and turned to him.

“By the way, you three did well today, grumbling aside…” Meilan murmured, giving him a path on the shoulder. “That’s not a nice environment for a spiritual cultivator…”

“Uh… thanks,” he replied a bit caught off guard.

“See you at dinner,” she added, giving him a smile and then setting off again towards her rooms on the ground floor.

He stared after her for a long moment…

“—Oh, you were still in the baths?”

He turned to find Leng on the stairs wearing a loose robe.

“Ah… yeah,” he replied.

“And was that Meilan?” Leng added, glancing after her retreating figure.

“…”

“I am going to have to just hug your thigh. How is it you keep ending up in the bath with beauties?” Leng joked.

“…”

“I’ll see you at dinner,” he said drily, giving Leng a pat on the shoulder as he started up the stairs. “Save me a seat.”

“Will do!” Leng chuckled.

Heading back upstairs, he quickly swapped into a proper light robe and after some contemplation, swapped his boots for lighter shoes. His clothes from earlier were still dripping puddles, so he spent a few moments wringing them out, then fixed his hair and went back downstairs.

Grabbing a seat beside Leng, he considered the food and just tucked into it without much care for the wider conversation. Mostly it was Ding and the others spinning tales about the herbs they had sealed. It was only when they started asking Leng about their day again, picking up on some conversation thread that he had missed in the baths, that he found himself making some vague contributions. Still, he was glad when he could just make his excuses, having eaten his fill and head back upstairs.

He had barely lain down on the bed, however – or at least that was what it felt like – when someone came and banged on the door.

“Who… is it?” he asked.

“Pei Quan… Caolun wants you to come join their gathering in the other building…” Ha Pei Quan called.

“…”

“What is it about?” he asked, really not at all enthused.

“Just to talk about what was found today,” Pei Quan replied.

“Pass…” he groaned. “I know what was found today, I went along, if you recall.”

“…”

There was silence outside then the sound of footsteps leaving.

He sighed and got up, walking over to the seal on the door and locked it, then went back to bed and lay down again with a tired groan and shut his eyes.

----------------------------------------

~ SIR HUANG – MISTY JASMINE INN ~

----------------------------------------

“So… this is today’s haul?”

Lan Huang found himself stirred from his meditation on the large pile of herbs in pots by Fanqing Diaomei appearing beside him and leaning on his arm.

“It is,” he agreed.

“It’s more than I thought,” Diaomei mused.

“The quality is not that great,” he sighed. “Most are five, maybe six star grade?”

“I did see that collection of Lingzhi you sent back first thing,” she added.

“Even it’s barely seven-star though, despite the size,” he pointed out. “What they are after is eight and nine-star grade herbs.”

“Sadly, those do not grow on trees, unless you… know where to find a spirit tree somewhere,” Diaomei reminded him.

“True,” he agreed. “So, what about the other matters?”

“Hmm….” she hummed under her breath for a moment.

“Caolun’s silliness this morning is… odd. I am almost inclined to think that it’s not entirely his fault?” she mused.

“Go on,” he said, interested in her take on that.

“Well, Ha Cao Quanbo sent a message saying he wanted to speak to Caolun on an important matter in the near future,” she replied.

“Caolun then gets delusions of grandeur… he is apparently quite taken with this trial, according to Meilan, and of course wants to wait. Ha Cao Quanbo is a supreme elder. At the same time, Yun’s group is going to go out, and have a hard day in the valleys, and will come back to Wufan and Caolun’s groups, who have at best done some very light work when they can be forced, or at worst, done nothing at all?

“Yun’s group is already at odds with the hunters, although not quite as badly, perhaps, as it first appears. Their dislike is mostly circumstantial, bar the usual laddish divide between a bunch of egotistical boys and a group of young women who feel the world really isn’t doing them any favours.

“If you go and try and force Caolun to go, that’s going to put another split, Caolun will sulk, and feel like the world is really messing with him, and if he misses Quanbo’s message…”

“It will reflect badly on him and he will have disrespected an Elder…” he concluded.

That was basically his reading of it as well, and partly why he had given Caolun the opportunity earlier on to preserve a lot of face by not being chained naked in the rain for being a prat.

“Yes,” Diaomei sighed. “Of course, Caolun went, and while he grumbled for a bit, he was mostly a useful person and saw some interesting things, as I understand it?”

“Well, he was the least useful of the three, but he was not dead weight,” he replied. “Part of it is that his spiritual foundation is just… worse than Yun or Leng’s, and both of them have spent some extended periods in the Low Valleys, so they acclimatize better.”

“So, someone is trying to cause divisions between the Ha family, Cao family and Ji family?” Diaomei murmured with a frown.

“Or at least the Cao and Ji with the Ha,” he agreed.

“Do you have any idea regarding the actual message?” he asked.

“Oh… from Elder Quanbo?” Diaomei shook her head. “They sent a further message to Ha Fanjing, who is apparently someone from Elder Quanbo’s estate, in the mid-afternoon to say he was entertaining important guests and that Caolun should wait for his contact at the earliest convenience.”

“Hmmm…”

-Which is to say, they were hedging their bets…

“How did Fanjing react?”

“Did Caolun get a message?” Diaomei asked.

“No… he did not,” he mused.

-Does that mean that Caolun is not the real leader of that group?

Actually, given the importance of this to the Ling clan and the Ha clan’s ambitions, he was dead certain they had their own people along. That was one reason why he was not giving the other groups too much to do. Ha Yun’s group while a bit immature, was trustworthy in that regard.

“What about Ji Wufan?” he asked, turning to head back outside.

“Legitimately poisoned by monkey piss infused spirit alcohol,” Diaomei said with an amused chuckle, falling in beside him. “I asked Senior Ying and she said she will look into it. The monkey sleeps over there, in the shrine.”

“That is something to keep an eye on,” he mused. “There was evidence that monkeys are venerating the old shrines in the valley we were in, and that cultivators might have disturbed at least one, fairly recently. The very last thing we need is this all to go up in flames because a monkey band decides that was us.”

“…”

“That would be a problem,” Diaomei agreed.

“Sir Huang, Fairy Diaomei…”

He nodded politely to the guard, Ling Wentai, sitting by the entrance.

“Oh, here you are!”

Almost at the same time as they left, Lianmei arrived at the storeroom, sheltering under an umbrella.

“You were looking for me?” he asked.

“Yes, sort of,” Lianmei sighed. “Want to walk with me?”

Nodding, he took out an umbrella for both him and Diaomei and followed Lianmei out into the rain.

They walked in silence for a few minutes, until they were standing near the butchery tent far from any obvious places they could be overheard.

“It seems we will have trouble arriving tomorrow, in some fashion,” Lianmei said at last.

“Oh?” Diaomei frowned.

“The Ha clan are sending reinforcements, concerned at the ‘scale of the task’ and the ‘lack of experience’ in the elite hunters being deployed. Given that Elder Quanbo apparently spent a lot of today sequestered with ‘special guests of the Ha clan’ who had come to discuss how they might help our province in its ‘time of crisis’…”

“Let me guess… you expect that group will involve a few outside experts?” he grimaced.

“Yep,” Lianmei agreed, making a face.

“Any idea which ones?” Diaomei asked.

“Din clan, most likely. Din Kongfei and Din Jian Fuhao are the ones who were living it large in West Flower Picking Town along with two others,” Lianmei said. “Similarly, the Ling is also going to send a bunch, from the Bai and Qing clans, although Ling Tao said she was resisting that.”

“So… what do you want to do?” he asked her.

“…”

“The bunch coming are more interested in the trial than our problems,” Lianmei frowned. “Based on what I have seen of Portam Rhanae, I am almost tempted to give them that valley and its big tasty ruins and its tombs and send the hunters out ahead, along with your group, to work uninterrupted.”

“So, they keep coming back here, but those teams just range farther and farther?” he mused.

“Yes, and if necessary, set up a forward post to make transport more efficient. We will have to get over the ridgeline first though.”

“And if that doesn’t work?” Diaomei asked.

“Then we abandon this place to the Ling and Ha clans dreams of this trial and head for the Inner Valleys,” Lianmei said.

They talked a bit more about the specifics of what that might entail, until Kun Ji came out, looking for Lianmei and she bid them farewell.

“Nothing is ever simple, is it?” Diaomei mused as they walked back into the inn.

“Indeed,” he agreed.

The common room was now mostly empty, bar Lin Ling, Han Shu, Jun Sana and Duan Mu playing two on two match of Gu Takes All, watched by the monkey, and Jiang Wushen and Mo Shunfei sitting having a drink.

“A major problem could actually be the recovery of the groups sent out today,” Diaomei added. “Half of them barely made it to the end of dinner, especially Yun and Leng.”

“They were pushed hard today,” he replied drily. “I was interested to see what they were made of.”

“And?” Diaomei asked.

“The Ha family and Erlang family may have let them have a bit too much freedom, but their foundations are surprisingly solid,” he judged. “For spiritual cultivators, wading around in water up here is grim, even if you’re experienced.”

“And what about you?” Diaomei asked him a bit archly. “Perhaps your junior sister could give you a bit of a massage? It must have been tiring, ensuring they didn’t fall in a hole and drown…”

“Did you not have enough fun last night?” he joked.

“Mmmmm,” Diaomei bit her lip.

“…”

Rolling his eyes, he headed after her through to the stairwell. Arriving in the room she shared with Meilan on the second floor, she closed the door and sealed it, before turning to look at him with smouldering eyes.

“Well, you don’t get a massage with your clothes on…”